When you have millions starving a night on the piss and killing a few relatives is small beer.

And Garth perhaps you might have only seen a couple of farms for “visitors” , just asking.

DPF
When are you Wellington people going to come out and say publicly that Gareth Morgan is a dick and has zero relevance to anything happening in New Zealand today ?or are there instructions to pussyfoot around the clown

stephieboy

Gareth Morgan reminds me of how seductive authoritarian regimes can be to travelers who often have only avery superficial knowledge of their inner workings and machinations .
Am thinking especially of those who travelled to Stalin’s Russia in the 1930s . Most spoke wonderfully of, ” I have seen the future and it works’ ( Bernard Shaw) whilst the Great purges were underway and millions were either being slaughtered or sent to the Gulags.
Precisely the same phenomena occurred with Mao’s China etc.
Yes North Korea might indeed have lovely countryside . The Soviet Union as well but there is a lot more than mountains , rolling hills ,streams and plains etc that Mr Morgan seem to suggest.

Manolo

She was first identified as Kim Jong-un’s old flame 13 months ago, in July 2012. The poised, coiffed and elegantly dressed companion of North Korean dictator Kim Jong-un was filmed sitting next to him at a concert in Pyongyang, then ascending the stage with him to applaud the performers.

One month later, she vanished from the scene as abruptly as she had arrived. On Friday came the shocking news that Hyon Song-wol, one of the most popular singers in the reclusive state, had been executed by machine gun.

Michael

MH

“nth korea has talent show” has had few applicants this year…Gangnam style killings still on the increase The Nth Korean impersonator doing the dance is actually shown leaping to avoid bullets from the military judges.

alwyn

stephieboy @ 12.19am
Sorry but the quote about “have seen the future” wasn’t by George Bernard Shaw.
That statement was by the US reporter Lincoln Steffens who visited the USSR in 1919.

In terms of needing to be drunk to order the odd murder we have of course the counter-example of Adolf Hitler.
He was a teetotaller but that didn’t stop him being responsible for millions of murders.
Kim Jong-Un has a long way to go before he gets into Hitler’s class.

Johnboy

Reid

The two aides who were telling the military to fuck off were executed with a firing squad of antiaircraft guns.

When Jong Un executed his former lover along with the orchestra and sent their families off to the camps, I did some research and discovered they had executed a senior general who wasn’t sufficiently grief stricken over Jong Il, by making him stand on the spot where they’d zeroed in a couple of mortars.

In other words, they officially choose bizarre ways of killing humans which means to me the entire administration gives no truk toward civilised actions but rather is in fact a genuine gangster regime with no limits just like Stalin’s was and just like Hitler’s was and just like Pol Pot’s was. Which has a lot of relevance to us or more particularly to Japan by virtue of the fact they have nukes and delivery systems.

Sure. The people at the top of every single nation including ours are always a pack of implacably ruthless wolves and I’m not [just] talking about politicians I’m also talking about the people at the top who advise them. You can if you wish chose to hallucinate that the people who you see on telly aren’t really like that at all but I’m afraid history proves you incorrect and it will continue to prove you incorrect unless you drop that hallucination.

But it’s a serious thing, to have an unstable bastard like Jong Un in charge of what he’s in charge of. Not that I ever believe a word of what the MSM ever says.

Harriet

“…..DPF
When are you Wellington people going to come out and say publicly that Gareth Morgan is a dick and has zero relevance to anything happening in New Zealand today ?or are there instructions to pussyfoot around the clown….”

No…….there are orders!

All Wellingtonians are of the big government mindset. It’s their livelyhood. Anyone who opposes that is shot down in public.

hj

I recall Gareth Morgan saying:

The price of housing remains at historical highs relative to household income, despite the housing doldrums of the last 5 years. The over-investment in housing that we’ve sponsored has come at a high price: diversion of capital away from deployment in industry and income and employment and instead into an asset class where the predominant objective of investment has been capital gain. Of course capital gain is not guaranteed but if there exist sufficient incentives for people to invest here rather than elsewhere, then it will materialise, in time. The reasons have historically been twofold:

1. A directive to banks from our Reserve Bank to favour lending on mortgage to other forms of lending – this is effected by the lower risk weightings it deems residential mortgages deserve compared to other lending types.

2. A tax break on housing to the extent that capital gains ensue and are not taxed.

Of course these two conspire to comprise a self-fulfilling outcome of capital gains. The lending distortion sponsored by the Reserve Bank ensures there’s more credit available for this form of investment than others, so people can get into this activity more easily than, say, funding a business. And the tax break increases the effective return so of course compared to other investments this will make housing a more attractive alternative. So lubricated with the credit availability we all pile into the asset in unison and drive up its price. Hardly rocket science. The point is of course though that this is not a demand that’s driven in any way by economic fundamentals such as the demand for shelter – it’s purely speculative and totally contrived by the regulatory and taxation framework. It would be fine if there weren’t an opportunity cost – a decided lack of investment in businesses that generate most income and employment.

Flyingkiwi9

“Frankly I don’t see the DPRK regime through any different lens than I see China, Russia, Saudi Arabia, Malaysia – even Singapore at times – authoritarian regimes all of them,” he added.

Probably a pretty fair representation for most of those countries. I’m sure countries like China and Russia happily execute at will of the government just its trendy to expose North Korea because we all hate the place.